Poet Karren LaLonde Alenier as author of The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas continues with her operatic proclivities as she launched her latest poetry collection The Anima of Paul Bowles in Los Angeles in 2016. Amy King saaid, Anima “makes a lyrical dive into the historical corpus of two major 2oth-century writer/artists.” More info: karren@alenier.com.

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Thursday, April 4, 2013

BPR LIT TRIP 4 with Caitlin Doyle

On day 4 of the Birmingham Poetry Review tour of volume 40, the Steiny Road Poet has decided to have some kitschy fun with the subject of
death and has thereby selected Caitlin Doyle’s “Madame Tussaud.” The poem, one of two published in BPR 40, is a portrait of
the great wax portrait maker who lived from 1761 to 1850. Doyle taps into the
bizarre beginnings of Marie Tussaud’s wax modeling with these opening lines.

She made death masks of executed men,

their severed heads more real in wax than flesh.

Now wax herself, whatever she was then

is more unreal. She could be Mother Goose,

While the poet stays focused on the sculptress, the poem
veers into the present day as Tussaud herself, rendered in wax and wearing her
signature bonnet trimmed in lace, “meets” contemporary figures such as the
British Heroin Chic model Kate Moss, the Chinese American martial
artist-actor Bruce Lee, the “Material Girl” singer Madonna, and the
drop-dead-gorgeous actor Brad Pitt.

What makes the poem notable is its form and craft. There are
four quatrains with the rhyme scheme abac defe ghgi jklk. Most of the lines are
ten syllables long. In her combination of words, Doyle employs a subtle sonic
sensitivity producing near rhymes like death and executed, couch and touch, closer and pose. The inverted repetition
of death mask (from the opening line) in the last line—“alive enough to be a
mask for death” gives the poem a wink of circularity.

About the Poet

is author of seven collections of poetry, including Looking for Divine Transportation (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press), winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature, and her latest, The Anima of Paul Bowles from MadHat Press. Her poetry and fiction have been published in such magazines as: the Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Poet Lore. Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her opera with composer William Banfield and Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes premiered at New York City’s Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia in June 2005. She writes a monthly column on opera for Scene4 Magazine at scene4.com.